lavanya_six (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lavanya_six) wrote2008-08-14 12:29 am
lavanya_six) wrote2008-08-14 12:29 am
Plot Bunny - "No Miracles"
Like a lot of writers, I come up with ten ideas for every decent one I use. I've got a dozen-odd fanfic "chapter 1s" kicking around on my hard drive. Since I'm 1) scatterbrained, 2) lack lots of free time, and 3) can't work on more than two long-form stories at a time... I'd thought I'd share this one with you.
Below the cut is a excerpt from a relatively short 8-part story (short for me, "Taking Sights" is over 100k at this point and it's not even a third of the way through the story). I've been kicking this around in my head for a while but I'm not quite sure if it has enough meat to merit more investment. It's called "No Miracles" and it's a divergence fic set after the 10th Angel's attack (the bigass skydrop Angel). These are the first three scenes and they're in rough draft form. No revisions yet.
Fair warning, it's dark.
NO MIRACLES
Chapter 1/8: No Homecoming
The sea was dirty and rough. The sky overhead shone brilliantly with sunlight.
Supreme Commander Gendo Ikari looked out the VTOL over the choppy sea where Tokyo-3 had once stood. The city was gone now. Fire and water had taken it along with all that had dwelt within it. A new sea, one Ikari mused might properly be called the Ashi Sea, stretched outward in a twenty kilometer diameter, spilling off along its eastern rim into the Pacific Ocean.
The whole island of Honshu had been placed under a state of emergency, and the Shizuoka, Kanagawa, Chiba, and Yamanashi Prefectures were under martial law. Foreign aide was already streaming into the country at an impressive clip. The first food shipments were now arriving at the refugee camps barely a day after the disaster.
Civilian causalities were relatively low considering the scale of the disaster – the D17 evacuation ordered by the late Major Katsuragi had seen to that. To the eight hundred and twenty thousand people who no longer had homes, jobs, or their property the disaster had changed their lives forever. In the case of many who had lived in Tokyo-3, the disaster had been greatest. NERV had employed three quarters of the city's work force. There were more than enough stories of dead wives, dead husbands, and dead parents to go around. The twelve thousand essential personnel who had not evacuated under the D17 died at their stations, along with all but two members of NERV HQ's senior staff.
Gendo Ikari was familiar with death, both of the personal and impersonal verity. This time and place should have been no different, yet he found his thoughts drifting towards Ritsuko Akagi despite the need to salvage Unit-01. He looked to his side and grew worried at the ghostly expression on the Vice-Commander's face. "Are you all right?"
"…"
"Kozo?"
"No," said the elderly man.
The VTOL cruised onward over Earth's latest Dead Sea.
=-=-=3-=-==-==-=-=-=--=-==--==--==--=-=-=
The three of them, still dressed in their Plug Suits, were locked in the empty cabin aboard the frigate. Three sets of clean if slightly oversized civvies sat folded atop the cabin's small sink. None of the three were looking at each other. They hadn't, not intentionally, not for nearly a day.
The JSSDF crew manning the ship had been surprised to see them when they'd pulled their Entry Plugs aboard. No one had told them that the NERV pilots they were recovering from Ground Zero were teenagers. They'd heard rumors about NERV and the Evangelions, sure, but they like most others had put down certain ideas for being too outlandish. Fourteen year-olds dressed in skin-tight suits didn't seem realistic.
Then again, neither had the idea of a monster dropping out the sky and wiping out a city. Both notions were now as real to the ship's crew as the hole in the ground named Tokyo-3.
Shinji looked over towards the locked door. The room was quiet enough that his Plug Suit creaked as his weight shifted in the folding chair. "How long are they going to keep us here?" he wondered aloud, his voice throaty from disuse.
"How the fuck should I know?" snapped Asuka, face down on the bed's lower bunk.
Rei Ayanami, resting on the floor opposite the hull, stared up and out a port hole. She did nothing, said nothing, as she had for hours. A half empty glass of water sat next to her, along with a bottle of pill liberated from Unit-00's medical kit. The Commander had made it SOP that Rei kept a stash of her anti-rejection medication onboard her Eva in the event of her being stranded. It was a piece of foresight that had proved wise.
"I just wanted to ask someone," he said softly, "where we're going."
"We're not going anywhere," explained Asuka, rolling to her side so that her voice wouldn't be muffled by the pillow she had been crying hot tears into. "Because there's nowhere left to go!" With that she hid her face again, embarrassed and ashamed by her own weakness.
Shinji stared down at his own feet. His toes felt squishy with the traces of LCL sloshing around in the bottom of his suit. He wiggled his little piggies around, trying as he had for the past day to not think about the fact that Misato Katsuragi was dead. It wasn't working very well. He wished he had his SDAT player, that his SDAT player hadn't been atomized, but then he felt guilty about thinking such a petty thing and went back to staring at his toes.
When they had pulled him out the sea it hadn't seemed real to Shinji that was looking at what used to be Tokyo-3. It just looked like another unending stretch of water that he going to drown in. He half-expected to see the Over the Rainbow and the rest of its fleet sail by. Maybe, wormed in the traitorous wish, they're lying to you. Maybe it's all just a big trick. Maybe Misato is all right. Maybe—
Shinji laughed sharply at his own childishness.
"What?" demanded Asuka, her voice hot and rough. "What's so fucking funny?"
"Nothing."
"Fuck you," she said, lying on her side "And you too, Wondergirl," she told the unresponsive pale girl, never once looking at her or Shinji, focusing on the smooth steel of the cabin wall. "If only you'd done your jobs right – like me – then we'd have won and Kaji and Misa—"
"YOU BITCH!!" screamed Shinji, jumping to his feet. His chair clattered to the ground and hit Rei. No one cared. "YOU'RE AS MUCH TO BLAME AS US!" he screamed at the top of his lungs.
Asuka sat up on the bunk and turned around. She had to lean her shaky arms on the mattress for support. She knew her legs were jelly. If her mess of a face shocked Shinji, he didn't show it. "You were closer than her. If you'd been faster," she told him in a calm, factual manner, "then I'd have had someone to help me hold it back, neutralize its momentum. You failed."
"F-F-FUCK YOU!" he shouted, hot tears streaming down his face. "I tried! I ran as fast I could! B-b-but... but." He crumpled against the nearest wall. "Oh God. Oh God. Oh God."
"You are not to blame," said Rei, not moving. "Major Katsuragi was at fault."
"No!" snapped Asuka, sitting up straighter. Her feet dangled useless on the floor, rolling at an uncomfortable angle to her ankles. "Don't brush this off on her! You weren't fast enough! It's YOUR fault!"
"You are incorrect," replied Rei, turning her head and locking eyes with Asuka. The redhead shivered at the fleeting human connection. "The MAGI calculated the odds of our successfully intercepting and destroying the Angel at less than one in ten thousand. Even knowing that, Major Katsuragi still did not take the logical step of evacuating herself or other vital personnel from headquarters." Rei continued on, her tone as inoffensive and emotionless as ever, "She also admitted that she picked our Eva's deployment points on a whim. The Angel's last minute shift to an impact point beyond Unit-01's reach merely compounded her errors."
"Shut up," wheezed Shinji.
"Major Katsuragi and her plan are ulti—"
"SHUT UP," screamed Shinji, dropping to the floor mere feet from Rei. Fighting back sobs, he choked out, "Just… just everyone… please shut up. Please."
Silence settled back over the cabin.
=-=-=3-=-==-==-=-=-=--=-==--==--==--=-=-=
The deck of the Sakawa swayed under the VTOL as it attempted three times to land on her. The first two passes had been aborted as the ground wind kicked up. The atmosphere over the newly extended Pacific Ocean was still tumultuous following the clash of cold seawater into the molten crater caused by the 10th Angel's impact. After the crash of two search and rescue planes the JSSDF was being extra cautious, especially so with craft carrying the last two Commanders of NERV's Japanese branch.
When the VTOL circled around for its third and final attempt on the Sakawa it passed over the Yahagi, a destroyer in the same cluster of ships circling atop the sunken Evangelions. Gendo Ikari noted the three off-white elongated capsules strapped to her deck.
"LCL," he said.
Fuyutsuki, torn from his own thoughts, looked at his friend with equal measures of confusion and irritation. "What about it?"
The Entry Plugs were lost as the aircraft came about. "We'll need to have more shipped in from the strategic reserves at the Third Branch. Our own reserves in Matsushiro won't last long and it remains to be seen how quickly the Terminal Dogma Salvage Operation can get underway."
"If Terminal Dogma still exists," dry remarked the Vice-Commander.
Gendo turned his head away from the sight of the ocean spread out below them. "Lilith would not be undone by so small a thing."
"And the millions of tons of metal and debris burying her? Can we undo 'so small a thing', Commander Ikari?"
All Gendo Ikari said was, "We'll have more shipped in from the Third Branch."
Below the cut is a excerpt from a relatively short 8-part story (short for me, "Taking Sights" is over 100k at this point and it's not even a third of the way through the story). I've been kicking this around in my head for a while but I'm not quite sure if it has enough meat to merit more investment. It's called "No Miracles" and it's a divergence fic set after the 10th Angel's attack (the bigass skydrop Angel). These are the first three scenes and they're in rough draft form. No revisions yet.
Fair warning, it's dark.
NO MIRACLES
Chapter 1/8: No Homecoming
The sea was dirty and rough. The sky overhead shone brilliantly with sunlight.
Supreme Commander Gendo Ikari looked out the VTOL over the choppy sea where Tokyo-3 had once stood. The city was gone now. Fire and water had taken it along with all that had dwelt within it. A new sea, one Ikari mused might properly be called the Ashi Sea, stretched outward in a twenty kilometer diameter, spilling off along its eastern rim into the Pacific Ocean.
The whole island of Honshu had been placed under a state of emergency, and the Shizuoka, Kanagawa, Chiba, and Yamanashi Prefectures were under martial law. Foreign aide was already streaming into the country at an impressive clip. The first food shipments were now arriving at the refugee camps barely a day after the disaster.
Civilian causalities were relatively low considering the scale of the disaster – the D17 evacuation ordered by the late Major Katsuragi had seen to that. To the eight hundred and twenty thousand people who no longer had homes, jobs, or their property the disaster had changed their lives forever. In the case of many who had lived in Tokyo-3, the disaster had been greatest. NERV had employed three quarters of the city's work force. There were more than enough stories of dead wives, dead husbands, and dead parents to go around. The twelve thousand essential personnel who had not evacuated under the D17 died at their stations, along with all but two members of NERV HQ's senior staff.
Gendo Ikari was familiar with death, both of the personal and impersonal verity. This time and place should have been no different, yet he found his thoughts drifting towards Ritsuko Akagi despite the need to salvage Unit-01. He looked to his side and grew worried at the ghostly expression on the Vice-Commander's face. "Are you all right?"
"…"
"Kozo?"
"No," said the elderly man.
The VTOL cruised onward over Earth's latest Dead Sea.
=-=-=3-=-==-==-=-=-=--=-==--==--==--=-=-=
The three of them, still dressed in their Plug Suits, were locked in the empty cabin aboard the frigate. Three sets of clean if slightly oversized civvies sat folded atop the cabin's small sink. None of the three were looking at each other. They hadn't, not intentionally, not for nearly a day.
The JSSDF crew manning the ship had been surprised to see them when they'd pulled their Entry Plugs aboard. No one had told them that the NERV pilots they were recovering from Ground Zero were teenagers. They'd heard rumors about NERV and the Evangelions, sure, but they like most others had put down certain ideas for being too outlandish. Fourteen year-olds dressed in skin-tight suits didn't seem realistic.
Then again, neither had the idea of a monster dropping out the sky and wiping out a city. Both notions were now as real to the ship's crew as the hole in the ground named Tokyo-3.
Shinji looked over towards the locked door. The room was quiet enough that his Plug Suit creaked as his weight shifted in the folding chair. "How long are they going to keep us here?" he wondered aloud, his voice throaty from disuse.
"How the fuck should I know?" snapped Asuka, face down on the bed's lower bunk.
Rei Ayanami, resting on the floor opposite the hull, stared up and out a port hole. She did nothing, said nothing, as she had for hours. A half empty glass of water sat next to her, along with a bottle of pill liberated from Unit-00's medical kit. The Commander had made it SOP that Rei kept a stash of her anti-rejection medication onboard her Eva in the event of her being stranded. It was a piece of foresight that had proved wise.
"I just wanted to ask someone," he said softly, "where we're going."
"We're not going anywhere," explained Asuka, rolling to her side so that her voice wouldn't be muffled by the pillow she had been crying hot tears into. "Because there's nowhere left to go!" With that she hid her face again, embarrassed and ashamed by her own weakness.
Shinji stared down at his own feet. His toes felt squishy with the traces of LCL sloshing around in the bottom of his suit. He wiggled his little piggies around, trying as he had for the past day to not think about the fact that Misato Katsuragi was dead. It wasn't working very well. He wished he had his SDAT player, that his SDAT player hadn't been atomized, but then he felt guilty about thinking such a petty thing and went back to staring at his toes.
When they had pulled him out the sea it hadn't seemed real to Shinji that was looking at what used to be Tokyo-3. It just looked like another unending stretch of water that he going to drown in. He half-expected to see the Over the Rainbow and the rest of its fleet sail by. Maybe, wormed in the traitorous wish, they're lying to you. Maybe it's all just a big trick. Maybe Misato is all right. Maybe—
Shinji laughed sharply at his own childishness.
"What?" demanded Asuka, her voice hot and rough. "What's so fucking funny?"
"Nothing."
"Fuck you," she said, lying on her side "And you too, Wondergirl," she told the unresponsive pale girl, never once looking at her or Shinji, focusing on the smooth steel of the cabin wall. "If only you'd done your jobs right – like me – then we'd have won and Kaji and Misa—"
"YOU BITCH!!" screamed Shinji, jumping to his feet. His chair clattered to the ground and hit Rei. No one cared. "YOU'RE AS MUCH TO BLAME AS US!" he screamed at the top of his lungs.
Asuka sat up on the bunk and turned around. She had to lean her shaky arms on the mattress for support. She knew her legs were jelly. If her mess of a face shocked Shinji, he didn't show it. "You were closer than her. If you'd been faster," she told him in a calm, factual manner, "then I'd have had someone to help me hold it back, neutralize its momentum. You failed."
"F-F-FUCK YOU!" he shouted, hot tears streaming down his face. "I tried! I ran as fast I could! B-b-but... but." He crumpled against the nearest wall. "Oh God. Oh God. Oh God."
"You are not to blame," said Rei, not moving. "Major Katsuragi was at fault."
"No!" snapped Asuka, sitting up straighter. Her feet dangled useless on the floor, rolling at an uncomfortable angle to her ankles. "Don't brush this off on her! You weren't fast enough! It's YOUR fault!"
"You are incorrect," replied Rei, turning her head and locking eyes with Asuka. The redhead shivered at the fleeting human connection. "The MAGI calculated the odds of our successfully intercepting and destroying the Angel at less than one in ten thousand. Even knowing that, Major Katsuragi still did not take the logical step of evacuating herself or other vital personnel from headquarters." Rei continued on, her tone as inoffensive and emotionless as ever, "She also admitted that she picked our Eva's deployment points on a whim. The Angel's last minute shift to an impact point beyond Unit-01's reach merely compounded her errors."
"Shut up," wheezed Shinji.
"Major Katsuragi and her plan are ulti—"
"SHUT UP," screamed Shinji, dropping to the floor mere feet from Rei. Fighting back sobs, he choked out, "Just… just everyone… please shut up. Please."
Silence settled back over the cabin.
=-=-=3-=-==-==-=-=-=--=-==--==--==--=-=-=
The deck of the Sakawa swayed under the VTOL as it attempted three times to land on her. The first two passes had been aborted as the ground wind kicked up. The atmosphere over the newly extended Pacific Ocean was still tumultuous following the clash of cold seawater into the molten crater caused by the 10th Angel's impact. After the crash of two search and rescue planes the JSSDF was being extra cautious, especially so with craft carrying the last two Commanders of NERV's Japanese branch.
When the VTOL circled around for its third and final attempt on the Sakawa it passed over the Yahagi, a destroyer in the same cluster of ships circling atop the sunken Evangelions. Gendo Ikari noted the three off-white elongated capsules strapped to her deck.
"LCL," he said.
Fuyutsuki, torn from his own thoughts, looked at his friend with equal measures of confusion and irritation. "What about it?"
The Entry Plugs were lost as the aircraft came about. "We'll need to have more shipped in from the strategic reserves at the Third Branch. Our own reserves in Matsushiro won't last long and it remains to be seen how quickly the Terminal Dogma Salvage Operation can get underway."
"If Terminal Dogma still exists," dry remarked the Vice-Commander.
Gendo turned his head away from the sight of the ocean spread out below them. "Lilith would not be undone by so small a thing."
"And the millions of tons of metal and debris burying her? Can we undo 'so small a thing', Commander Ikari?"
All Gendo Ikari said was, "We'll have more shipped in from the Third Branch."
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